Women Writers, the Left, and Peru's Internal Armed Conflict

ABSTRACT: This article considers the exclusion of most women-authored literature from the "Conflict Canon," a group of critically acclaimed and commercially successful literary works that have come to represent Peru's Internal Armed Conflict (~1980-2000) both nationally and internationally. Focusing on Carmen Ollé's Por qué hacen tanto ruido (1992), Silvia Miranda Lévano's Memorias de Manú (1997), and Karina Pacheco Medrano's No olvides nuestros nombres (2009), I trace how each novel not only narrativizes war against the grain but also sustains a meta-literary denunciation of their author's writerly conditions of (im)possibility. In each case, this denunciation involves a parallel critique, staged from the political Left, of male poets, intellectuals, and academics who espouse progressive, even revolutionary ideals while simultaneously muffling the voices of their women counterparts. An extension of this critique, I propose, is palpable in the novels' collective refusal to, on the one hand, adopt the gore-filled literary discourse of the Conflict Canon and, on the other hand, narrate 'traditional' forms of wartime violence. Across the article, I argue that the work of Ollé, Mirada Lévano, and Pacheco Medrano invite new theorizations of women's narrativization of war, both relative to the Peruvian context and beyond. At the same time, and particular to Peru, I propose that the novels speak to the stakes of maintaining literary-discursive status-quos, particularly considering the Andean nation's recent, Conflict-evoking experiences of socio-political crisis.